The Humbling

by Philip Roth

  HE WENT UP to the attic and sat there for a whole day and well into the night, preparing to pull the trigger of his shotgun and intermittently ready to rush down the stairs and wake Jerry Oppenheim at home, ready to call Hammerton and speak to his doctor, ready to dial 911.

  And at a dozen different moments throughout the day, ready to call Lansing and tell Asa what a treacherous son of a bitch he was to have turned Pegeen against him. That was how it had happened, he was sure. Pegeen had been right all along to want to keep the news of their affair from her family. “Because they’ve known you so long,” she’d explained to him when he’d asked why she preferred to keep him a secret. “Because you’re all the same age.” Had he made the trip to Michigan when he first suggested to Pegeen his going out there to talk to Asa, he might perhaps have had a chance to win. But to phone Asa now would accomplish nothing. Pegeen was gone. Gone to Tracy. Gone to Lara. Gone to the pitcher with the ponytail. Wherever she was, he no longer had to worry about the genetic hazards of being an aging father with testicular cells that had already divided well over eight hundred times.

  By dinnertime he could restrain himself no longer and, carrying the gun with him, he came down from the attic to the phone.

  Carol answered.

  “It’s Simon Axler.”

  “Why, yes. Hello, Simon.”

  “Let me speak to Asa.” His voice was trembling and his heartbeat had quickened. He had to sit in a kitchen chair to continue. It was very like the way he’d felt in Washington the last time he had tried to go out on a stage to perform. And yet none of this might be happening if only Louise Renner hadn’t made that vengeful midnight phone call telling the Staplefords about their daughter and him.

  “Are you all right?” Carol asked.

  “Not really. Pegeen has walked out on me. Let me speak to Asa.”

  “Asa is still at the theater. You could try his office there.”

  “Put him on, Carol!”

  “I just told you, he’s not home yet.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful news? Isn’t it a great relief? You no longer have to worry about your daughter tending to the needs of a feeble old man. You no longer have to worry that she’ll have to be keeper to a madman and nursemaid to an invalid. But then I’m not telling you anything you don’t know—I’m not telling you anything you didn’t help to cook up.”

  “You’re telling me that Pegeen has left you?”

  “Let me speak to Asa.”

  There was a pause, and then, unlike him, with perfect composure, she said, “You can try to reach Asa at his office. I’ll give you the number and you can call him there.”

  He did not know now, any more than when he decided to call, whether he was doing the right thing, the wrong thing, the weak thing, or the strong thing. He set the gun on the kitchen table and took down the number Carol gave him and hung up without saying anything further. If he were given this role to act in a play, how would he do it? How would he do the phone call? In a voice that was trembling or a voice that was firm? With wit or with savagery, renunciation or rage? He could no more figure out how to play the elderly lover abandoned by the mistress twenty-five years his junior than he’d been able to figure out how to play Macbeth. Shouldn’t he just have blown his brains out while Carol was at the other end listening? Wouldn’t that have been the best way to play it?

  He could stop, of course. He could stop the madness right here. He wasn’t going to win Pegeen back by going on to dial Asa’s number, yet he dialed it. He wasn’t trying to win her back. There was no winning her back. No, he simply would not be outmaneuvered and outwitted by a second-rate actor who held sway, with the second-rate actress who was his wife, over a regional theater in the middle of nowhere. The Staplefords couldn’t make it on the stage in New York, they couldn’t make it in film in California, so they’re making great dramatic art, he thought, out beyond the corruptions of the commercial world. No, he would not be defeated by these two mediocrities. He would not be a boy overcome by her parents!

  The phone rang only once before Asa answered and said hello.

  “Just how did it benefit you,” Axler began, seething, shouting resentfully, “to turn her against me? You couldn’t stand that she was a lesbian in the first place. That’s what she said—neither you nor Carol could bear it. You were appalled when she told you. Well, with me she had relinquished all that, with me she had opened herself to a new way of life— and was happy! You never saw the two of us together. Pegeen and I were happy! But instead of being grateful to me, you persuade her to pick up and leave! Even her going back to being a lesbian was preferable to her being with me! Why? Why? Explain this to me, please.”

  “First, Simon, you must calm down. I won’t listen to a tirade.”

  “Do you have some special dislike of me dating back to the beginning? Is there envy here, Asa, or revenge perhaps, or jealousy? What harm have I done her? I’m sixty-six, I haven’t been working, my spine’s a problem—where is the horror in that? Where is the threat to your daughter in that? Did it prevent me from offering her anything she wanted? I gave Pegeen everything I possibly could! I tried to satisfy her in every conceivable way!”

  “I’m sure you did. She said as much to Carol and me. No one could fault you for your generosity and no one has.”

  “You know she’s left me.”

  “I do now.”

  “You didn’t before?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you, Asa.”

  “Pegeen does what she wants to do. She’s done that all her life.”

  “Pegeen did what you wanted her to do!”

  “I am well within my rights as a father to be concerned about a daughter and give counsel to her. I would be remiss if I didn’t.”

  “But how could you ‘give counsel’ when you knew nothing about what was going on between us? All you had in your head was a vision of me, with all my renown, with all my success, stealing away what was rightfully yours! It wasn’t fair, Asa, was it, that I should have Pegeen too!”

  Shouldn’t he have played that line for a laugh instead of delivering it in a fit of anger? Shouldn’t he have been quietly sardonic, as though it were a deliberately needling overstatement rather than his sounding out of his mind? Oh, play it however you like, Axler told himself. Probably you’re playing it for laughs anyway without your even knowing it.

  He detested his tears but he was all at once crying again, crying from the shame and the loss and the rage all tangled together, and so he hung up on the call to Asa that he never should have made in the first place. Because it was he, finally, who was responsible for what had happened. Yes, he had tried to satisfy her in every imaginable way, and so, idiotically, he’d introduced Tracy into their life and undone everything. But then how could he have foreseen that? Tracy was party to a game, a beguiling sex game of the kind that any number of couples play for diversion and excitement. How could he foresee a pickup at the bar would end with his losing Pegeen for good? Would someone smarter have known better? Or was this a continuation of the turn his luck had taken playing Prospero and Macbeth? Was all of this owing to stupidity, or was it just his way of digging himself one layer deeper down into the final demise?

  And who was this Tracy? The new salesgirl at a rural antique shop. A lonesome drunk at a country inn. Who was she compared with him? This was impossible! How could he be overthrown for Tracy? How could he be defeated by Asa? Was Pegeen leaving him for Tracy because subterraneanly it hurled his little girl back into Papa’s arms? And suppose she wasn’t leaving him for Tracy. Or leaving him because of her family’s objections. Then what had made him repugnant to her? Why was he suddenly taboo?

  He carried the gun into Pegeen’s study and stood there looking at the room that she had stripped of Victoria’s wallpaper and then painted a shade of peach, the room that she had made into hers just as he, holding nothing back, had invited her to make him into hers. He suppressed an urge to fire a shot into the back of her desk chair and sat
in it instead. He saw for the first time that all the books she’d brought from home had been removed from the bookcase beside the desk. When did she empty those shelves? How far back did the decision to leave him go? Had it been there all along, even while she was stripping these walls?

  Now he suppressed the urge to fire the gun into the bookcase. Instead he ran his hand over the empty shelves that had housed her books, and tried in vain to think of what he could have done differently over all these months that would have made her want to stay.

  After what must have been at least an hour, he decided not to be found dead in Pegeen’s room, in Pegeen’s chair. The culprit wasn’t Pegeen. The failures were his, as was the bewildering biography on which he was impaled.

  WHEN, LONG AFTER calling Asa, sometime around midnight—having retreated back to the attic several hours before—he could not pull the trigger even after he had gone so far as to place the barrel of the gun inside his mouth, he challenged himself to remember tiny Sybil Van Buren, that conventional suburban housewife weighing less than a hundred pounds who finished what she set out to do, who took on the gruesome role of a murderer, and succeeded at it. Yes, he thought, if she could summon up the force to do something so terrible to the husband who was her demon, then I can at least do this to myself. He imagined the steeliness that went into her carrying her plan to the brutal end: the ruthless madness that she’d mobilized in leaving the two small children at home, her driving singlemindedly to the estranged husband’s house, her mounting the stairs, ringing the bell, raising the rifle, and, when he opened the door, without hesitation her firing twice at point-blank range—if she could do that, I can do this!

  Sybil Van Buren became the benchmark of courage. He repeated to himself the inspiring formula to action, as though a simple word or two could get him to accomplish the most unreal of all things: if she could do that, I can do this, if she could do that . . . until finally it occurred to him to pretend that he was committing suicide in a play. In a play by Chekhov. What could be more fitting? It would constitute his return to acting, and, preposterous, disgraced, feeble little being that he was, a lesbian’s thirteen-month mistake, it would take everything in him to get the job done. To succeed one last time to make the imagined real he would have to pretend that the attic was a theater and that he was Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev in the concluding scene of The Seagull. In his mid-twenties, when, as a theatrical prodigy, he accomplished everything he tried and achieved everything he wanted, he had played the part of Chekhov’s aspiring young writer who feels a failure at everything, desperate with defeat at work and love. It was in an Actors Studio Broadway production of The Seagull, and it marked his first big New York success, making him the most promising young actor of the season, full of certainty and a sense of singularity, and leading to every unforeseeable contingency.

  If she could do that, I can do this.

  There was a note of eight words found alongside him when his body was discovered on the floor of the attic by the cleaning woman later that week. “The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself.” It was the final line spoken in The Seagull. He had brought it off, the well-established stage star, once so widely heralded for his force as an actor, whom in his heyday people would flock to the theater to see.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” He has also won American PEN’s two highest awards: the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Bellow Award.

  He is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of nine volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” He has also won American PEN’s two highest awards: the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Bellow Award.

  He is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of nine volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.